Alice Waits

Janis Freegard

It’s like. It’s a lot like. It’s like being in love. It’s that mirror you see yourself reflected in. This is me. It’s like. It’s a lot like. It’s like being. It’s like being in love.

Come on, little Alice, you know how to wait. Alice can wait years. Alice is a Wild Child. Alice casts a spell, with Alice as the bait. Alice wants it all to be over. Alice wants it all to go on. Alice wants hope. Alice wants assurance. Alice is sometimes not quite sure exactly what she does want.

Alice is both too old and too young for this. Alice is exactly the right age.

Oh my dears, did I ever tell you? How wonderful and how like a roller-coaster and how exactly? And it’s lies I know, but on the inside, darlings, on the inside. I can’t begin to tell you. Me, in my furs, all possum of course. And all the silver cutlery, did I ever tell you? Perhaps I forgot. It’s where I always belonged, hotels like that. And I had a hangover that day. I remember.

Janis Freegard is the author of the poetry collection Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus (Auckland University Press, 2011) and co-author of AUP New Poets 3 (2008). She was born in South Shields, England, and lived in South Africa and Australia before her family settled in New Zealand when she was twelve. She lives in New Zealand’s windy capital city, Wellington, with an historian, a cat, and various spiders. http://janisfreegard.com